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Revised scope · 18 September 2026

Ontario qualifies vendors through a procurement list. Québec certifies products one by one, in public, and can suspend one. The same patient-facing promises pass through two different machines.

The project narrows from four Canadian programs to one deep comparison: Ontario's procurement-based Vendor of Record arrangement against Québec's certification-based arrangement, which keeps product-level records in public view. Nova Scotia and British Columbia are set aside for the course project. The earlier plan, and the analysis it produced, are kept intact under the second tab.

What changed, and why
The scope narrows for evidentiary reasons, not for coverage. Québec replaces Nova Scotia and British Columbia because its record can be read: a named product, a status, a public list, and — apparently — a status that can be taken away. Comparison becomes the instrument rather than the ambition.

This follows the supervisor's guidance to keep the scope manageable and grounded in a clear case-study design. The Ontario material, the four-fallacy lens and the three ethical readings all carry over; what changes is the second case and the research questions it makes answerable. The previous four-program pitch is preserved under Original pitch · V2 so the revision is auditable rather than overwritten.

✉ The scope note sent to the supervisor (18 September 2026)

Thank you again for your earlier guidance on keeping the project scope manageable and grounding it in a clear case-study design.

After reviewing the available public materials, we are considering narrowing the project rather than extending it across several provinces. Specifically, we propose using Québec as a deep comparative case to Ontario, replacing Nova Scotia and British Columbia for the course project. The comparison would focus on two distinct governance arrangements for AI scribes: Ontario, a procurement-based, multi-vendor Vendor of Record arrangement; Québec, a certification-based approach with publicly available, product-level records, including an apparent public suspension/enforcement event involving Scribe MD.

This seems more feasible than our earlier Ontario–Nova Scotia–BC plan. In particular, Nova Scotia appears to be a smaller Infoway-supported single-vendor pilot rather than a clear standalone “mandate,” while key contractual material relevant to responsibility allocation in British Columbia does not appear to be public. Québec, by contrast, gives us a more documentable comparison of how an AI-scribe system's claims are assessed, made visible, and potentially challenged.

We would not treat approval, certification, or vendor self-attestation as proof that a system is clinically safe or trustworthy; rather, we would examine what the public record makes checkable and what it leaves unresolved.

S1 The scope decision

Four jurisdictions were in the earlier design. Two remain. The deciding test was not how interesting the program is, but whether its public record can carry a claim-by-claim reading.

Jurisdiction Role in the revised design Reason Corpus status
Ontario Anchor case — procurement-based The fullest public record of the four: the Vendor of Record tender and its feature matrix, the commissioned clinical evaluation, professional and privacy guidance, and an external audit that surfaced procurement-stage accuracy testing two years later. captured 11 Ontario records + 5 vendor policies
Québec Comparison case — certification-based Assessment attaches to a named product rather than to a vendor's place on a list, and the resulting status is published and maintained. An apparent public suspension involving Scribe MD would be an observable enforcement moment — the one thing the Ontario record does not contain. capture pending targets listed in S6
Nova Scotia Out of analytical scope On the public materials it reads as a smaller Infoway-supported single-vendor pilot rather than a standalone provincial mandate. The intended contrast — “mandate versus marketplace” — does not hold up against the documents. retained, not coded kept in the register
British Columbia Out of analytical scope Under direct clinician–vendor contracting, the documents that would show how responsibility is allocated are the contracts themselves, and they do not appear to be public. The case would be argued from what is missing. retained, not coded kept in the register
The selection rule Cases were selected on documentary tractability, not on representativeness. That is a limit to state in the paper, not to hide: the comparison describes two governance arrangements whose records happen to be readable, and says nothing about the provinces whose records are not.
S2 Two machines for the same promise

Both provinces make patients roughly the same promises — you will be told, you will be asked, a clinician will review, the record will be accurate and correctable. They route those promises through different apparatus, and the apparatus decides what a member of the public can check.

Ontario · procurement-based

Unit of assessment: the vendor, at the moment of qualification. Instrument: Supply Ontario's Vendor of Record arrangement (Tender-20123), 20 vendors at award and 30 after a second intake.

What the public gets is the criteria and a feature matrix. What it does not get, routinely, is the scoring or the test results: the procurement-stage accuracy testing of 2024 reached the public through the Auditor General in May 2026. Qualification is a gate, not a standing status; there is no published mechanism by which a product's position changes after award.

Québec · certification-based

Unit of assessment: the product, on a list that is maintained. Instrument: the MSSS Bureau de certification et d'homologation and its published list of certified and homologated products, alongside Santé Québec's AI transcription program and the Collège des médecins' guidance on AI scribes.

Because the status is published and maintained, it can in principle be withdrawn — and a withdrawal is itself a public fact. The apparent Scribe MD event is the reason this case was chosen; confirming it, and finding its documentary trace, is the first task of the corpus work.

Read through the accountability dimensions carried over from the earlier analysis:

Dimension Ontario (procurement) Québec (certification)
What is assessedA vendor's offering against procurement criteria, once, at qualification.A named product against certification requirements, with a status that persists and is maintained.
Who verifiesThe procuring body, which also wrote the weights.A certification office inside the ministry, distinct from the body that runs the clinical program. to confirm
What is publishedCriteria, qualified-vendor list, feature matrix. Scores and test results are not routine outputs.A product-level list with status. The underlying assessment record's publicity is the open question. to confirm
TimingEvidence surfaced two years after the fact, through an external audit.Status is visible at the moment it changes — if a change is in fact announced.
Enforcement visible to the publicNo published mechanism for removing or suspending a qualified product.An apparent suspension involving Scribe MD. unverified
Where a patient standsCan read that a vendor is “qualified”; cannot reach the evidence behind the word.Can look up whether the product used on them holds a status today — a thinner claim, but a checkable one.
S3 Revised research questions

Main RQ

How do Ontario's procurement-based and Québec's certification-based AI-scribe governance arrangements translate patient-facing commitments into publicly checkable claims, and what remains difficult or impossible to verify from the public record?

  • RQ1 — What patient-facing commitments concerning transparency, consent, clinician review, record accuracy, and correction are articulated in Ontario's and Québec's public governance documents?
  • RQ2 — For each commitment, what claim, criterion, evidence, and verifying actor are specified in the public record?
  • RQ3 — How do procurement-based governance in Ontario and certification-based governance in Québec differ in what they make publicly checkable, for whom, and at which stage of deployment?

What carries over

The evaluative lens is unchanged: verification performed in patients' name, by a body patients did not appoint, against criteria they did not set. The four fallacies of Paris, Moon and Guo still organise the findings, and the three-way coding — evidenced, asserted, absent — still applies to every commitment.

What is set aside

The earlier Sub-RQ3 on public online clinician discussion leaves the design with the four-program plan. It depended on an REB determination and a permitted route to Reddit data; the prep document is kept, and the strand can return as future work rather than as a course deliverable.

S4 The RQ2 instrument

RQ2 is the analytical engine: for each patient-facing commitment, the public record is read for four things. A commitment with a claim but no criterion is a promise; one with a criterion but no verifying actor is an unowned rule. The grid below shows the instrument with the Ontario column carrying the earlier findings and the Québec column left open until the corpus is captured.

Commitment Claim / Criterion Evidence / Verifying actor Ontario (from V2) Québec
Transparency
the patient is told
Claim stated in professional guidance; no criterion for what a notice must say. No evidence artefact; the verifying actor is the individual physician. asserted to code
Consent
and refusal without penalty
Express consent in the chart is treated as best practice; refusal must not change the standard of care. Recording practice and refusal rates are not collected publicly. asserted to code
Clinician review Required before a note enters the chart; no criterion for what review consists of. No approved system required an attestation step, so review leaves no artefact. asserted to code
Record accuracy Accuracy tested during procurement; weighted 4% of the score with no minimum pass mark. Results existed inside the procurement and reached the public through an external audit. absent at the time of deployment to code
Correction
when the record is wrong
Rights exist in health privacy law; no scribe-specific channel is specified. No public evidence of a correction pathway that names AI-generated content. absent to code
Why the comparison earns its place: if Québec's certification attaches evidence and a named verifier to even one of these five rows, the Ontario finding stops being a general statement about AI scribes and becomes a statement about a governance form. That is the difference between a critique and a case study.
S5 Method & boundaries

Design

A document-based, comparative sociotechnical case study of two governance arrangements. Two cases, one instrument, one coding rule. Every finding is a finding about the public record at a stated capture date, not about clinical performance.

Corpus

Procurement and certification records; program documents; privacy and professional guidance; vendor-facing requirements where public; and the available public enforcement record. Each item is registered with issuer, date, URL, access date, content hash and a verification status.

Language

Most Québec material is in French. Coding is done on the French original; quotations appear in French with an English rendering, and the rendering is marked as the author's. Terminology is not harmonised across provinces — certification and homologation are kept as each source uses them.

What this does not claim

Approval, certification and vendor self-attestation are not treated as proof that a system is clinically safe or trustworthy. The study examines what the public record makes checkable and what it leaves unresolved. A suspension, if confirmed, is evidence that a status can change — not evidence about the product's clinical quality.

S6 Corpus targets for the Québec case

The register currently holds the Ontario, national and set-aside provincial material. These are the Québec-side captures the revised scope requires; each needs an access date, a hash and a verification status before it can be coded.

  • Certification list — MSSS, Liste des produits et services certifiés et homologués, Bureau de certification et d'homologation. ti.msss.gouv.qc.ca — the product-level record the comparison turns on.
  • Certification procedure — MSSS, Orientations, procédures et documents utiles pour la certification. msss.gouv.qc.ca — where criteria and verifying actors are defined, if anywhere.
  • Certified applications — MSSS, Applications certifiées. msss.gouv.qc.ca
  • Clinical program — Gouvernement du Québec, Projets de transcription par intelligence artificielle. quebec.ca — the deployment side, and the counterpart to Ontario's programme material.
  • Professional guidance — Collège des médecins du Québec, Scribe et intelligence artificielle. cmq.org — the Québec counterpart to CPSO advice.
  • Program Q&A — Santé Québec, Foire aux questions — Scribes IA (PDF, hosted by CMQ). cms.cmq.org — the closest thing to patient- and clinician-facing plain language.
  • Enforcement event — the apparent suspension involving Scribe MD. unverified · source not yet located A general web search on 18 September 2026 did not surface a primary notice. Before this enters the paper it needs a dated primary document — a list entry showing the status, a ministry or Santé Québec notice, or an archived snapshot of the list before and after.
  • Privacy authority — Commission d'accès à l'information du Québec, any guidance on AI scribes or on Law 25 as applied to clinical recording. to search

Ontario-side documents are already registered: the Tender-20123 record and vendor feature matrix, the WIHV/CDHE clinical evaluation, OntarioMD programme material, CPSO advice and the Medical Records Documentation policy, the IPC guidance and checklist, and the Auditor General's special report. Full list under the Original pitch · V2 tab.

S7 Open items to settle
01 Confirm the Scribe MD event, or drop it from the argument.
The suspension is the single strongest reason to prefer Québec, and it is currently the least documented thing on this page. If no dated primary record can be produced, the case still stands on the published product-level list — but the enforcement claim must come out of the abstract and out of the framing.
blocking
02 Fix the terminology: certification, homologation, or both?
Québec's certification office covers both certification and homologation, and AI scribes may sit under one, the other, or under Santé Québec's program rather than either. Which regime actually applies decides what “certification-based” means in the main RQ, so it has to be settled before drafting.
blocking
03 Is a two-case comparison the right size for the course deliverable?
Two cases coded across five commitments and four columns is forty cells. If that is too much, the fallback is Ontario as the case and Québec as a contrast section — the comparison then illustrates rather than carries the finding.
for the supervisor
04 Does the French-language corpus need a stated translation protocol?
Coding a governance claim depends on wording. The current rule — code the French original, quote in French, mark the English rendering as the author's — should be written into the method section rather than left as practice.
method
05 Confirm that Nova Scotia and British Columbia stay in the register but out of the analysis.
The captured documents are evidence for the scope decision itself and should be cited as such in the limits section, rather than deleted. The paper then says why two provinces were dropped, with the documents to show for it.
proposed
The contribution, restated for two cases Paris, Moon and Guo show that verification can move trust without earning it. Ontario shows where that trust lands when the gate is a procurement list. Québec tests whether attaching the assessment to a named, published, revocable product status moves any of it back within a patient's reach.